Conversation with Albie Sachs

Albie Sachs Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

Page 6 of 8

Detention

Let's review this experience of detention and the subsequent book that emerged, The Prison Diary of Albie Sachs. What were you arrested for and how long were you in solitary confinement?

I was detained under what was called the 90-Day Law. You didn't have to be given a reason. It was enough for the security police to have a suspicion that you had information which could help them in their security inquiries. Then they could lock you up for 90 days, in solitary confinement, without access to lawyers, family, anybody else. At the end of the 90 days I was about to be released. I packed everything. I was going out. I was extremely suspicious, it was the hardest period of my life by far. And before I could reach the front door of the discharge office, a cop was there. He put out his hand, shook my hand, and said, "I'm placing you under arrest again." And I went back inside. I had to unpack the few things that I had, sign the property receipt again for my watch, and back into my cell. So I spent another 78 days. It was 168 days in solitary.

And the name of the game here by the authorities was to break your will and, as you say, to destroy your personality.

To destroy you, to get information from you, to get you to become a witness against others and to terrorize other people knowing that this might happen to them.

And you survived this. One of the things that seems to emerge in The Prison Diary of Albie Sachs -- there are many things but let's walk through some of them. You seem to be saying that you had to come to terms with who you are, that you could not change the kind of person you are. You say, "I am conciliatory rather than defiant. My manner is gentle, my demeanor quiet." On the other hand, you weren't going to cooperate with the authorities.

I was very worried. I felt a good revolutionary is angry, wants to storm the Bastille, wants to kill the oppressors. And I found I didn't have that sort of emotion. I thought there was something wrong with me, that I needed psychoanalysis or something to "let real anger come out." But that's just the way it was. I didn't hate the guards. I didn't want to pick up a dagger and plunge it into their back. Even with the people questioning me, interrogating me, I never had that immediate, feral, personal kind of anger. And in the end I decided, well that's just the way I am. I might mention that amongst my greatest heroes, and I did reading afterwards (not heroes, I don't even like the term "heroes" and I hate being called a hero), the people I identified very much with were Gandhi -- without getting into his philosophy, but his description of his trials, what he did in jail -- and the suffragettes. I love the suffragettes. And I think I loved them very much because they made a struggle with just themselves. They went to jail and they resisted force feeding, and they didn't go out to kill the enemy and to storm and to break down. It wasn't physical in that sense. All they had was themselves and their will and their determination and their courage, and a sense of personal dignity and beauty. I identify very strongly with them.

Human interaction, human communication, become very important, and I want to talk about two aspects of that, but following on what you just said, you had very human conversations with your guards, with the commanders of the facilities, and in the end you, without accepting their values, accepted their humanity.

photos by Jane Scherr

Yes. And not only at the end, it was right from the beginning. For me it was very important to have human contact with somebody. I needed it. The one station commander used to shout and swear and was extremely unpopular with all the persons underneath him. The only person he could speak to and get a hearing from was me. But it suited me down to the ground, it was breaking the silence. And some of the things he said were quite extraordinary and astonishing, but again maybe it was the writer in me. I would see someone sitting there -- that's his world view, that's how he sees things, that's what makes him tick. He had as much integrity, if you like, within his frame as I had within mine.

So at the same time that you were enduring all of this you were, in essence, becoming an observer of yourself, of your guards, and of the other prisoners when you would see them in passing.

Being an observer is a very active position to be in. You're watching, you're noting, you're sensing. You're imagining. You remember it afterwards. You anticipate in advance. And it fills the world. It was just like nothing. I had me, the walls, my toes, my memories. The memories fade, the world outside becomes very distant. So you absorb intensely and powerfully the tiniest little thing that happens -- noises, sounds, the people that come in, how they look, how they speak, their body language, their emotions all become intensely interesting. I wouldn't build up too grand a philosophical thing on that, it is survival that's at stake there.

And it was also very important for you to preserve your self-esteem.

Well that's partly done through physical activity. I used to do exercises. It's done very much through mental activity. I used to try to imagine and remember the states of the United States of America. I'd run through the list, Alabama, Arkansas ... and I didn't even know how many there were, whether it was forty eight or forty nine or fifty. And then I couldn't write it down so I'd have to remember by counting on my fingers. And then I couldn't remember if I'd already remembered, if I'd been through it. But it was a form of structuring thought, of being in charge of your life. I used to love singing songs, starting with "Always":

I'll be living here always,
Year after year, always.
In this little cell that I know so well,
I'll be living swell ...

And I would just dance around. B would be "Because"; C, "Charlemagne"; D, "Daisy"; and so on. So these were ways of structuring life, giving some order to the chaos, some sense of being in touch with what was going on. But you can't lift your self-esteem. You can do lots of things that make you feel more real.

But in the end, human action did matter in this situation.

Yes, I nearly gave in on several occasions. If they had got their timing right, maybe I wouldn't be sitting here now, maybe I would have collapsed, maybe I would have cooperated with them. Maybe I would have been so demoralized I would have been just another victim, sad, trying to rebuild my life somewhere else. But they never got the timing right.

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